Surviving the Wilmington Grand Prix: What It Takes

Great kids racing and other family
fun plays a big part of how this dad
schedules his race calendar!

On Saturday May 20th in Wilmington, Delaware, some of the best criterium bike racers in the country will gather to battle each other and themselves on one of the most challenging criterium courses in the country.

I say this not in a bluster of marketing hyperbole, but with the authority of a racer who's been pinning on a number for over 25 years. One who cut his teeth racing the infamously long and brutal 100 kilometer Superweek Criteriums and other legendary midwest races in the 1990s and early 2000s against the likes of professional teams including Saturn, Navigators, Jelly Belly, Mercury and others.

Downer, Waukesha, Snake Alley, Schlitz Park, Downer's Grove. Great courses, great races, great competitors. But great crit racing is not exclusive to the midwest.

The Green Mountain Stage Race's Burlington Criterium devastates unsuspecting riders who came to Vermont primarily to ride up mountains.

In the lively small city of West Chester, Pennsylvania, there lives a simple downtown 4-corner rectangular criterium (previously known as "Iron Hill") that has no business being as hard as it is.

The Wilmington Grand Prix, in Delaware is another brutally difficult race. In all of 3 of these races, the number of riders who DNF and/or are "Pulled & Placed" approaches the number of racers who complete the full distance.

What makes the Wilmington Grand Prix so challenging? For that answer, let's first take a look at the map of the course.



This is a 1-mile circuit with EIGHT turns. Six of those turns are concentrated in a tiny corner of the race. They blitz the racers within 30 seconds of the start. Critically the first 4 are fast moving, slightly terrifying downhill turns within 350 feet of one another. And they are followed by two uphill big ring climbing turns that call for 600+ watt bursts every lap. (More on this later).

So with all do respect to the truthful, but largely irrelevant platitude that "racers make the race." This one is mostly all about the course. The course forces selections early as riders with good start line positions clash with others who are more accustomed to road and circuit races where turns come miles apart. If you can't handle your bike, if you don't have confidence in the grip of your tires, the strongest riders will still fail and be directed off the course early by vigilant race officials attempting to keep order among chaos.

So why do I, a self-professed solid bike handler, get DROPPED EVERY YEAR? Back to the map. See those sections in red?

They are red, because that is where your legs will BLEED lactic acid and you will question your life choices.  The blue stretches are "anxious, stay focused and pray for recovery."

Digging into my own power file from the 2016 edition of the Cat 2/3 race we get an idea of what is required to finish on the lead lap in the bunch. For reference sake, readers should know that after a nasty crash in the first few laps, we were stopped and restarted 20 minutes later. In this time I went from a front row starting position to roughly mid-pack. Wattage numbers published here are a rough average of all the laps completed. Some laps were less, others were more.

40 seconds @ 2.63 w/kg.
Starting from the set-up to turn-1, dive-bombing through turns 2, 3, 4 and 5 will challenge all your handling skills and focus. If you get the lines right, you've got to take advantage of the longest single stretch of recovery per lap. What 40 seconds isn't enough? Too bad.

26 seconds @ 5.91 w/kg.
About halfway up the first climb heading into turn 6, you are full gas onto the descending backstretch. Wind conditions can be fierce here. Regardless expect it to be strung out and painful for about 1/2 the length until riders sit up to set up for turn 7.

26 seconds @ 2.04 w/kg.
Ready? The descent gets steeper, and you hardly have time to breath. Get the line and your spacing right and you'll flow up 1/2 the backside climb before the homestretch brings the pain.

50 seconds @ 5.28 w/kg.
Starting about halfway up the climb, up the false flat rising homestretch, comes the longest, uninterrupted stretch of power demands before you get back around to the "40 second recovery" zone that is turns 1-5.

Not impressed?
So that's it. Have you done the math? Are you thinking "What's the big deal? I can do that all day long!" Last year, roughly 42 of 72 could and did reach that bar. I wish I was one of you. The rest of us were yanked off the course well before bell lap. And not just anonymous riders like me. Guys with real results in many other competitive races.

I think what's critical to recognize about fierce crit racing is that it is not sufficient to look at your power dynamic curve and see that max efforts are well above what was apparently required in the course of the race. Rather, you must consider the context. The frequency, timing and placement of the wattage demands within the race.

I was able to do the dance for 13 laps. There were moments that I felt good, strong, in control and out of danger. But this race was closer to 24 laps long. And as one of my friends pulled away on the homestretch, taking his enormous draft with him, I came unglued and that was that.

I don't expect to podium this year's Cat 2/3 race,
but I continue to be inspired by my son.

Will I do better this year? On paper, I should be better. But we don't race on paper. Regardless, I'm looking forward to a truly challenging test at one of the best races of the year.

Kindergarten Quest: Thunderdome

A trip on the new 2nd Ave Subway
after his interview at Hunter

After reading about my son’s miraculous transformation into a meowing kitty the exact morning of an important school interview months ago, some of you have been asking, “How’s Peter? Meow.”

Peter’s great. Really great. His mom and I, however, are kind of a wreck. I've spent the last three days stress-eating an entire platter full of homemade lemon bars. "You didn't save me one?!?!" The baker-in-charge and my beloved wife asked me tonight. My bad?

The search for Kindergarten in NYC is not for those easily wearied. Sarah and I have visited 21 schools, and about half of those 2 or 3 additional times each. Peter had his share of visits too. 

We counted 10 “playdates”–a slightly weird and inaccurate term that the private schools use for these evaluation sessions. Generally speaking, upon arrival, parents are herded into a conference room, while our children are whisked away, brought into rooms (that we can only assume are actual, or closely resemble, classrooms), where they spend 45-120 minutes being the perfect combination of unquestionably charming, obviously brilliant and decidedly desirable to an audience of school teachers and administrators.

But let me repeat. PETER HAS BEEN GREAT. He’s always first in line, remembers to ask the new-to-him teachers if he can wear his Santa hat, and comes back after "class" ready for the next adventure.

We don’t know exactly what happens in these mock classes. Peter, for all his charms, is still a frustratingly terrible historian. And the schools either tell you nothing about what happened, or bore you with vague details (trust me, "vague details" is a thing) that mean nothing. 

And so, YOU MUST USE THE FORCE. Or come up with an impossibly specific question about a scenario you can only imagine....that a kid will also answer. So, yeah, just go ahead and use The Force. It’s easier.

On a chilly Saturday in January we embarked upon the GREATEST TEST OF THEM ALL. Hunter College Elementary School. Hunter is a selective K-12 public school with a progressive educational philosophy that has the resources of NYC private schools that cost upwards of $45,000 a year. If I had gone there, for example, I might not need a calculator app to tell you that getting in is like winning $585,000 lottery ticket. Or I might be performing on Broadway like alumnus Lin-Manuel Miranda. Because Hunter is magic. Obviously.

Given the high-stakes of this particular school interview, we briefly thought about asking him to keep the Santa hat he had been wearing all day, all night, every day since the 26th of December at home. 

But we couldn't. We wouldn't. Peter is his own person, packed with an adventurous, bold personality that frequently has us questioning from where exactly he came. We love that he spent weeks after Christmas asking if we like this or that then proudly exclaiming, "My elves made that!" We only hoped that the teachers at Hunter would be charmed by the boy with the Santa hat too.

Because this is no ordinary admissions process. It’s Thunderdome. Thousands apply, and only a few hundred 4-year-olds pass the Stanford-Binet V test and are invited to round two interviews.

Can't make your interview date? TOO BAD. NO HUNTER FOR YOU. Arrive a few minutes late (as we heard one poor parent did that Saturday). TOO BAD. NO HUNTER FOR YOU.

It’s cut-throat. After my wife and I shared a brief and genuine moment of sympathy for the tardy parent, I wondered, did she come with a boy or girl? Because only 25 boys and 25 girls get spots in the school, and one less boy in the mix is good for us.

Hey, did I mention, IT’S THUNDERDOME?!?! Actually, it's worse.

“Six men enter, one man leaves. SIX men enter, ONE man leaves.”

Since that Saturday, we've been waiting for weeks and weeks and possibly years. (There's a very real problem with the space-time continuum of all of this.) We find out on Friday. Tomorrow or today or yesterday (what day is it?). 

Regardless of how it turns out. We are both so incredibly proud of how our meowing, Santa Claus hat-wearing son has been handling all of this.